Singer-Songwriter Greg Trooper Dead at 61

Trooper died after a battle with pancreatic cancer on Sunday (Jan. 15), two days after his 61st birthday, Nashville's Tennessean newspaper reports.

Well known for penning tracks for country artists including Vince Gill, Robert Earl Keen, Billy Bragg and Steve Earle, Trooper also released 13 albums of his own. His latest project, Live at the Rock Room, was released in 2015, shortly before his cancer diagnosis.

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The singer-songwriter was born in New Jersey on Jan. 13, 1956. He began his music career as a teenager when he would frequent folk venues in Greenwich Village in New York City. He eventually moved to New York in the 1980s after living in Texas and Kansas. In 1986 his band, the Greg Trooper Band, released its debut album We Won't Dance. Gill recorded the title track three years later for his When I Call Your Name album.

Trooper moved to Nashville in the mid-1990s and spent much of his time touring. He eventually moved back to Brooklyn in 2008. After being diagnosed with cancer, Trooper had to cancel four months of shows to undergo treatment, but that didn't stop him from pursuing his craft.

“So much of what I was facing was uncertain to begin with, but once I got into the routine of treatment and once the doctors saw how I was responding, I thought, I can work on the weeks when I’m not having treatment, start a new routine,” he told HeraldScotland.com in 2016. “That made me feel normal again to some degree. Then I wrote a couple of songs and that helped me to feel normal as well. There’s an enormous amount of comfort in being able to play music because when things go upside down like that, you think they’re never going to go the right way up again.”